The Accidental Product Manager

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Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager Where You Too Can Learn To Be A Wildly Successful Product Manger. Its mission is to provide product managers with help and guidance to make both them and their products a success.

Can anyone remember back in the day when there used to be a video rental store on just about every corner? We’d all head down to the rental store on a Friday with hopes that the latest release would be still in stock. We’d browse the aisles, pick out our one or two movies, perhaps grab some popcorn and then check the movies out for two nights. This of course meant that there was a mad dash back to the store on Sunday night in order to make sure that we didn’t get charged a late fee for keeping the movies out too long. Too bad DVDs and streaming services killed the product development definition for all of those video rental stores. Or did they?

Say Hello To Your Friendly Local Video Rental Store

So here’s the amazing thing: video rental stores do still exist! In the U.S. there are roughly about 100 of them. If you are looking for them, you’ll tend to find them that have a strong local food scene. It turns out that these stores fill a real consumer need. More often than not, video rental stores will offer a variety of films that movie lovers won’t be able to find anywhere else.

It didn’t always use to be this way – what changed? Originally video stores were the place where customers could go to rent video tapes. You remember those don’t you? They were rectangle black chunks of plastic and film that were about the size of a small hardcover book. These video rental stores did a booming business until DVDs arrived. When that happened although the video rental stores switched over to offering their customers DVDs to rent, it turned out that DVDs were smaller and weighed so much less than a video tape. This meant that they could easily and inexpensively be sent via the mail. Over at Netflix they quickly discovered that they could create a business in which all they did was send DVDs through the mail to their customers. Overnight this pretty much killed the video rental stores.

As though the arrival of DVDs was not enough to put an end to video rental stores, the march of time added some additional nails in their coffin. The first of these was the arrival of the Redbox automated rental service. Redbox is a physical DVD distribution machine that is often placed in high traffic locations such as a 7-Eleven or a grocery store. It is stocked with the top 20 most desired DVDs and offers low cost short term rentals. No store or employees are required. Just to finish things off, the arrival of movie streaming services from Netflix, Hulu and Amazon means that even the days of Redbox may be limited.

How Product Managers Keep Their Video Rental Stores Open

So what’s a video store product manager to do? It sure seems like the world is stacked against them. The answer to this question is yes – if they make the mistake and try to compete head-to-head with the Nexflix’s of the world. Instead, what the local video rental stores product managers have to do is to take a step back, study the other movie rental alternatives that their customers have, and then create something that is different. Get this right and you’ll have something to add to your product manager resume.

Different can take on a lot of different forms. One of the advantages that a video rental store has is that a movie that a customer knows that they want to watch may only be available on one given streaming service – and perhaps the customer does not have a subscription to that service. Additionally, movies are not always available on streaming services – they often get removed. Customers can choose to subscribe to 9 different streaming services or just visit one video rental store.

Video rental stores are thriving because they offer films that people can’t get anywhere else. This includes a large collection of Japanese anime. Many of these stores have also co-located with coffee shops in order to provide their customers with more than one reason to visit them. The video store product managers understand that a video store can provide things that no online service can. One of these is the ability to browse aisles of videos looking for an obscure title that you might not know exists. Just try and do that online!

What All Of This Means For You

Once upon a time, video rental stores seemed to rule the world. They were located on every street corner and we all used them. Then the world changed. DVDs and streaming video showed up and most of the video rental stores ended up closing and going out of business. However, not all of them. Some have still survived. Finding out how to keep a video rental store in business is part of the product manager job description for their product managers.

Roughly100 video rental stores still exist in the U.S. The reason that so many of them went out of business is due to a unique sequence of events. Video rental stores rented VHS (and Beta) videos that were relatively large and heavy. When DVDs arrived on the scene, they could be shipped to customers via the mail for a low cost. This allowed companies like Netflix to quickly take over the video rental market. Redbox has installed its DVD rental machines in high traffic locations in order to capture spur-of-the-moment purchases. The arrival of video streaming services would seem to have spelled the end for any video rental store. However, they still survive. The video rental store product managers have found ways to distinguish their stores from the alternatives. They’ve co-located them with coffee shops so that people have multiple reasons to visit them. They have an extensive catalog of movies that are not available on the streaming services. Finally, customers can browse the aisles of video rental stores – something that they can’t do online.

The trick for video rental store product managers going forward will be to find ways to capture new customers. They currently have the ones who remember the value of the old video rental stores, now they’ll have to find ways to capture a new generation of customers. If they continue to offer unique ways to get and watch movies, then video rental stores should be here for quite some time.

Doesn’t it seem as though the Starbucks coffee shops are just about everywhere by now? There are even some streets that have two of them: one on either side of the street so that people don’t have to flip around to get to a Starbucks. The market for coffee has become so large and so well served that the Starbucks product managers have a real problem on their hands. How are they going to change their product development definition to keep growing the business if they are already everywhere and serving everyone? It turns out that they think that they have the answer: go upscale.

So what’s the one thing that everyone knows about Santa? That he always delivers his gifts to the good boys and girls on Christmas morning. Not the day after Christmas. Or a week later. He gets it there on Christmas morning. As you might imagine, with more and more parents buying things online, the actual process of making sure that gifts get to the people who have ordered them is becoming much more challenging for the good folks at UPS and FedEx. Their product managers are going to have to get creative if they are going to save Christmas…

How The Grinch Tried To Steal Christmas

Last year Christmas fell on an awkward day. Just to make things a little bit more complex, Hanukkah started the day before Christmas. Due to where Christmas fell this year, people got a late start in their Christmas shopping. The last weekend that people could go out and shop at real stores (“bricks-and-mortar”) was a full week before Christmas. What this meant for people like me was that in the days running up to Christmas, the last minute shoppers were going to be turning online to get the gifts that they needed.

Ordering a gift online is all fine and dandy – it really only takes a couple of clicks. However, actually getting that item into your hand before Christmas can be a real trick if you’ve placed your order close to Christmas. Over at UPS they said that the Friday before Christmas was the last time that someone could ship a package with them with the expectation that it would arrive before Christmas. Anyone who sent something after that would have to pay extra to have it sent by air.

As you might imagine, the companies that ship packages in the United States, UPS, FedEx, and the postal service all have a limited amount of space to carry packages. During the holiday season they experience a surge that they don’t see during the rest of the year. As more and more of us start to buy things online, what’s starting to happen is that we are getting very close to exceeding their capacity to transport our gifts to us in time for the holidays.

How Product Managers Saved Christmas

Some product managers had product development definitions that allowed them to be uniquely positioned to take advantage of the shipping challenges that the traditional package carriers were facing. Amazon product managers created what they called “procrastinator’s delight” which was a service offered to their Prime members where they could get one or two hour delivery of ordered items up until midnight on December 24th in select cities. Walmart product managers offered in-store pick up of ordered items until 6pm on December 24th as long as the order had been placed by 6pm on December 23rd.

The good news, if indeed there was any, was that retailers could take a look at their calendars and realized that they were going to be in a bind this year. Hoping to find a way to minimize the disruption that too many orders were going to cause, the product managers at the companies that were selling all of the gifts worked with the shippers. What they did was to forecast the demand that they were going to be seeing and then go ahead and book space on the carrier’s planes to hold their goods. The U.S postal service understood the challenges that everyone was facing and agreed to make deliveries to select locations on Christmas Day. Any product manager who can successfully see into the future like this has something that they can put on their product manager resume.

What can a product manager do if they just are not going to be able to get their product into the hands of a last minute shopper? There are a number of different ways to deal with this problem. UPS had to deal with US$200M in additional shipping costs one year. When Amazon was not able to deliver gifts on time, they provided their customers with $20 gift certificates to try to make up for it. Other retailers in the past have either refunded shipping costs for gifts that didn’t make it on time or went so far as to refund the entire cost of the order.

What All Of This Means For You

Christmas is a special time of year for all of us. This is the time of year that we buy gifts for people in our lives. However, this past Christmas just happened to fall on a day that caused more and more people to decide to go online and make last minute purchases. What this meant was that the package delivery network quickly started to feel the strain. Finding a way to deal with this is something that should be on every product manager’s product manager job description.

It is easy to order something online; however, it can be quite difficult to make sure that that item is going to be delivered to the person ordering it by Christmas. There is always the possibility that the customer could pay more to have a package shipped by air, but few people would want to do this. Retailers realized that they could run into a problem and so they worked with the major shipping companies to forecast demand and reserve space on their planes. Certain retailers, such as Amazon and Walmart, were well positioned to take advantage of the challenge of last minute gift delivery. If a retailer could not complete a delivery by Christmas, then they had other options: they could pay for the extra cost of air shipping it, they could give the customer a gift card, or just refund the cost of the product.

Many product managers look forward to the Christmas season because it can mean a big boost in sales of their product. However, as consumers change their buying habits from going out to stores to now more often buying things online, shipping the things that they’ve bought to them by Christmas is becoming a real challenge. Product managers made it through this past Christmas, but they need to start getting ready to do it all over again this year!

Can anyone remember back in the day when there used to be a video rental store on just about every corner? We’d all head down to the rental store on a Friday with hopes that the latest release would be still in stock. We’d browse the aisles, pick out our one or two movies, perhaps grab some popcorn and then check the movies out for two nights. This of course meant that there was a mad dash back to the store on Sunday night in order to make sure that we didn’t get charged a late fee for keeping the movies out too long. Too bad DVDs and streaming services killed the product development definition for all of those video rental stores. Or did they?

As product managers, we spend a great deal of our time trying to figure out ways to get more people to buy our products. However, there is that very small collection of product managers who have extremely popular products who have a slightly different sort of problem that they have to work out. They really don’t have too much of a problem getting most people to buy their product because they have a great product development definition; however, now they have to figure out a way to get the last remaining few people who have not yet purchased their product to do so. We should all have such problems!

Some People Don’t Use Amazon!

If you are ever walking down the street where people are throwing their trash out, there is a very good chance that you’ll see a number of Amazon shipping boxes in the trash. The reason for this is because it sure seems like just about everyone buys something from Amazon. In fact, Amazon has created their Prime service where shipping becomes free just to get us to buy more. However, it turns out that roughly 17% of Americans (that’s 22 million people) don’t buy from Amazon. Solving this problem will look great on the Amazon product manager’s product manager resume

Why would someone not buy from Amazon? Well there are many different reasons. You might think that we’re talking about someone who lives in the back country. However, a number of the people who don’t buy from Amazon live in the city. They have no problem with technology. They subscribe to Netflix. Use Uber for transportation and look things up online. However, depending on where they live, they may not use Amazon. If they live in a building with no roommate or one that does not have a doorman, then they may not be comfortable with having a package left at their door. In this case, Amazon may not be an option for them.

There have been a number of different studies done on the people who have chosen to not shop at Amazon. What the studies have shown is that this group of people tend to be older than the average U.S. shopper – 57 years old vs 49 years old. Their annual income is generally less than average, they may roughly $45,700 per year compared to $62,800 for all shoppers. Finally, there is less of a chance that they either have or live with children.

How Amazon Product Managers Can Capture The Rest Of The Market

As you might imagine, the number of people who don’t shop at Amazon is a group of people who is getting smaller and smaller over time. When asked why they don’t shop at Amazon, this group of people provided a number of different answers. These included their current level of income, for some it was their living situation, and as you might well imagine for some it was simply their preference not to shop at Amazon.

Amazon just keeps getting bigger and bigger. This year their income is forecasted to grow by 28% to US$137 billion. Their sales size is greater than the combined sales size of the next 20 e-commerce sellers in the U.S. The people who don’t currently shop at Amazon generally don’t have access to the internet. This may mean that they are not part of the 80% of U.S. adults who had either a smartphone or a broadband connection at home.

The reason that some customers don’t shop at Amazon is because they are an online store. There is still some fear and mistrust of all things on the internet. Roughly 80% of all consumers still want to go and browse the goods that are available and to do this they need to go shop in a store. In order to get more people to get online and shop at Amazon, their product managers created the Prime membership program. Although not everyone belongs to this program yet, there are estimated to be 50 million Prime members.

What All Of This Means For You

I’m sure that every product manager would like their product manager job description to tell them that they have the same problem that the product managers at Amazon are facing: how to get the last few people who don’t use their service to finally decide to become Amazon customers. Most people already are; however, there is a small group of people who are just as happy shopping from their local stores and not getting anything from Amazon. What’s a product manager to do?

Since Amazon has already captured 87% of their U.S. customer market, now it’s just a matter of determining who is still left to capture. There have been studies done on the people who don’t currently shop at Amazon and it turns out that they are older, make less money, and probably don’t have any children. Their level of income and current living situation are often given as the reasons why someone is not currently shopping at Amazon. Access to the internet may play a key role in determining if someone shops at Amazon – 20% of shoppers either don’t have a smartphone or a broadband connection subscription at home. The Amazon product managers are attempting to create membership programs such as Prime that will lure the final remaining customers into their shop.

The good news for the Amazon product managers is that the number of people who don’t shop at their store keeps getting smaller and smaller. The bad news is that they are now down to the hard-core shoppers who don’t really want to shop at Amazon. The Amazon product managers are going to have to find products to offer that these people will decide that they have to have and this may be what finally turns them into online Amazon customers.

So what’s the one thing that everyone knows about Santa? That he always delivers his gifts to the good boys and girls on Christmas morning. Not the day after Christmas. Or a week later. He gets it there on Christmas morning. As you might imagine, with more and more parents buying things online, the actual process of making sure that gifts get to the people who have ordered them is becoming much more challenging for the good folks at UPS and FedEx. Their product managers are going to have to get creative if they are going to save Christmas…

In the modern restaurant industry, most of the challenges of preparing and serving food to customers have been solved. This means that product managers spend their time working on trying to make the process of buying food from their restaurants easier and quicker for customers. However, over at Chipotle they’ve run into some problems with the food that they serve and this is causing their product managers to have to scramble to try to fix problems that they thought that they had already solved.

What Went Wrong At Chipolte

Chipolte is a restaurant that serves Mexican food. There are a lot of other restaurants out there that do the same thing. In order to distinguish their food from everyone else’s, the Chipolte product managers have developed an obsession with serving high-quality, fresh ingredients. This is a key part of their product development definition. This has resulted in Chipolte becoming very popular with consumers who are seeking something different from traditional fast food. That’s something that we could all put on our product manager resume.

Earlier last year Chipotle ran into a problem with one of its suppliers of pork. This vendor was not following animal welfare standards and so Chipotle was forced to pull pork off of its menu for several months. Soon after this challenge was resolved, they were hit with cases of their customers becoming sickened by eating at their restaurant. Chipolte was linked to three cases of foodborne illness: a norovirus outbreak in Simi Valley, California, cases of salmonella in Minnesota which were traced back to tomatoes shortly after, and then E. coli in the Pacific Northwest. The result of all of these problems was that the chain was forced to close its 43 restaurants in Washington and Oregon.

So why in this day and age is Chipolte having these types of problems? People looking into the situation all seem to agree that having three outbreaks over the course of two to three months is highly unusual. There is a growing chorus of people saying that the Chipolte corporate leadership needs to step back at look at their food safety culture. The product managers at Chipotle have always known that they vulnerabilities. They believe that they may be at a higher risk for food-borne illness outbreaks than some competitors due to their use of fresh produce and meats rather than frozen, and their reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation.

What The Product Managers Are Doing To Fix Things

It would be great if we product manager could prevent problems like this from happening in the first place. However, all too often we can’t. When we have an event happen that effects our ability to sell our product we need to react quickly. One of the challenges that the Chipolte product managers are facing is that they are not really sure what is causing their problems. The recent string of events at Chipotle raises questions about whether there are shortcomings in its food safety practices or supply chain, or whether it has simply been the victim of some serious bad luck.

The Chipolte product managers knew that they needed to take action quickly. One of the first things that they did was to hire two food safety consulting firms to assess their standards. This provides everyone with the assurance that knowledgeable outsiders will be taking a look at how Chipolte prepares its food in order to determine if this could be the source of their outbreaks.

Additionally, the Chipolte product managers immediately closed all of their restaurants in the area of the outbreak out of an abundance of caution, even though the vast majority of these restaurants had no reported problems. The product managers then had each of the stores conduct additional deep cleaning and full sanitizing of its restaurants in the area. They then went one step further and had their restaurants tested by the company and the health departments, as well as their food and distribution centers.

What All Of This Means For You

Solving problems is a key part of what it means to be a product manager. However, there is nothing more frustrating with being faced with a problem that you don’t know how to go about solving. There’s nothing on our product manager job description that tells us how to deal with a situation like this. Over at the Chipolte restaurant chain, they’ve experienced an outbreak of different types of food poisoning that has their product managers scrambling.

Chipolte has based a great deal of its appeal on its use of fresh ingredients. However, this may possibly be causing their current problems. It is currently unclear why they are having the food poisoning problems that they are having.Outside experts have been brought in and a string of restaurants have been closed until a source of the problem is found. The Chipolte product managers are also making sure that their restaurants are very carefully cleaned and they are being tested along with Chipolte’s suppliers.

In a situation like this, when you don’t know exactly what to do, you still need to do something. You need to be able to show your customers that you are taking action in order to get to the bottom of the problem. The Chipolte product managers are doing exactly this. They are very clearly trying to show their customers that they understand the issue and they are dealing with it. We’ll have to see what the final cause of Chipolte’s problems are and if customers believe that the problems have really been solved.

As product managers, we spend a great deal of our time trying to figure out ways to get more people to buy our products. However, there is that very small collection of product managers who have extremely popular products who have a slightly different sort of problem that they have to work out. They really don’t have too much of a problem getting most people to buy their product because they have a great product development definition; however, now they have to figure out a way to get the last remaining few people who have not yet purchased their product to do so. We should all have such problems!

The product managers at McDonald’s have a problem on their hands. A recent study revealed that among younger burger eaters, the millennials, only one in five has ever eaten a Big Mac burger. For a 61 year-old burger chain, this does not bode well for the future. McDonald’s product managers need to take a look at their product manager job description and realize that they have a new job on their hands: they need to figure out how they’re going to go about capturing younger customers.

The Challenge That McDonalds Faces With Younger Customers

If you were a McDonald’s product manager and you woke up one day and realized that today’s younger generation was no longer visiting your restaurants and buying your food, what would you do? If you are like most of us, you’d realize that you need to start to have a discussion with this segment of your market in order to better understand what their wants and needs are. If you understand these, then you can create a dining experience that they’ll be willing to visit you to experience.

Here in the 21st Century, when you want to strike up a conversation with someone we all know how to go about doing this. Social Media. There are a number of companies out there that do a very, very good job of using social media to communicate with their customers: Starbucks and Zappos, have been doing this for years. They use social media to deal with all sorts of things like customer complaints, generate ideas, and to run promotions.

As recently as two years ago, McDonalds really had no way to respond to anything that was being said about it online. What makes this sorta amazing is that the McDonald’s global brand is mentioned online once every one to two seconds. McDonald’s has finally gotten around to setting up their own social media team. The product managers have set up digital media hubs in London, Singapore, and Oak Brook, IL. The goal of this team is to help McDonald’s find ways that they can win back the millennials that the company has lost to competitors who serve fresher food.

McDonald’s Product Manager’s Plans For Capturing Younger Customers

We all view social media as being a powerful tool that can be used to reach out to customers. This has been shown to be the case when there are customers with complaints – unhappy customers can be dealt with quickly and turned once again into happy customers. However, experts who have spent time studying social media caution product managers that the focus that they may apply to social media could end up producing very little return for their efforts. The number of tweets that a company sends or the number of Facebook likes that they receive do not necessarily translate into increased sales.

Social media has already turned out to be an important communication tool for the McDonald’s product managers. Their target market, millennials, started to use Twitter to complain about the fact that breakfast was not being served at McDonald’s past 10:30 in the morning. Based on this input, the chain has extended their breakfast menu to now be available all day. This change has paid off for McDonald’s. A recent survey of millennials revealed that 78% of the respondents said that they had visited a McDonald’s at least once in the past month. This was the best result that McDonald’s had seen in the past three years. Now that’s something to add to your product manager resume!

Recently, when the McDonald’s product managers were getting ready to roll out a new advertising campaign that talked about how their burgers are prepared, instead of setting up a focus group to test their ads, they turned to social media. The product managers decided to run ads on both Instagram and Facebook talking about the source, quality, and taste of their burgers. The feeling was that this type of advertising allowed McDonald’s to tailor their ads to the millennials and their specific needs.

What All Of This Means For You

Over at the very large fast food restaurant chain McDonald’s the product managers have a bit of a problem on their hands. One of the largest groups of consumers, millennials, are not eating at McDonald’s restaurants as much as the company would like them to. This means that the McDonald’s product managers need to take a careful look at their product development definition and determine what needs to be changed in order to capture the younger customers.

The first step in this process is to strike up a dialog with their target customers. The way that this gets done these days is to become active using social media tools. McDonald’s has gone ahead and set up three separate digital media hubs worldwide. The hope is that this will help them to win back customers that they have lost. The company is going to have to carefully evaluate what kind of benefits their social media involvement yields for them. It has already yielded one success in helping the company to understand that their younger customers wanted to be able to get breakfast menu items all day long.

Social media is a big deal. More importantly from the McDonald’s product manager’s point of view social media is how one of their most important target markets, millennials, choose to communicate. Taking the time to get involved in social media is probably a very good idea because it will allow McDonald’s to listen to what their customers are saying about them. The product managers are then going to have to figure out what steps to take once they know what their customers really want.

The Christmas season has always been the time that home owners take the time to decorate the outside of their homes to celebrate the season. What this generally involved was going into either the attic or the basement in order to drag out box after box that contain outside lights and decorations. Once this had been done, next came the physical challenge of putting up all of the lights and finding enough extension cords to connect them to outlets so that they could be turned on. This was a strenuous undertaking that nobody ever looked forward to. This was all before lasers got involved.

If you were the product manager for a grocery store, you wouldn’t think that you’d have to worry about getting young people to come into your store and buy things, would you? I mean, we all need the food products that grocery stores sell. Traditionally people have always shopped for food the same way: they made up a list, they came to the store, and they bought everything that was on their list. However, it turns out that with the millennialsthings are a bit different…

Why Millenials Don’t Shop Like Their Parents

So what do we know about millennial shoppers? The one thing that we can say about all of them is that they are in love with e-commerce – they grew up with the stuff. Unlike their parents who planned out what they were going to go buy when they went to the grocery store, government studies have shown that the millennials seem to go grocery shopping less often than their parents did. It looks like it’s time for grocery store product managers to change their product development definition.

One of the big problems that grocery store product managers are facing is that the shopping habits of millennials are different from the people who have made up the bulk of grocery store customers in the past. The millennials are spreading their purchases out over several different options. These options can include online grocery stores such as Amazon’s AmazonFresh, convenience stories that now carry more options, and non-traditional grocery stores such as Wal-Mart and Target stores.

Studies have shown that people between 25-34 years of age spent an average of $3,539 on average for groceries over the course of a year. It turns out that this is $1,000 less than the same group spent back in 1990. When you take a look at everyone who is buying groceries, the average spent last year was $4,015.

What Grocery Store Product Managers Can Do To Attract Millenials

This change in millennial spending patterns is not really the fault of grocery store product managers. Instead, the financial crisis left millennials with a lot of student debt and fairly weak job prospects. The result of this situation is that there has been a drag placed on consumer spending. As proof of this, sales at food and beverage retailers rose by 3.7% between 2002 and 2007. However, spending only rose by 2.4% from 2008 to 2013.

What product managers are discovering is that millennials are putting off marriage and childbearing milestones both of which generally result in more trips to the grocery store. In order to get millennials to shop at their stores, grocery store product managers are starting to roll out smartphone apps that allow customers to place their orders in advance. Do this right and you’ll have something to put on your product manager resume.

Additionally, product managers are starting to introduce new product lines. To help millennials get access to all of the products that the grocery store offers, grocery store product managers are starting to form partnerships with other firms. This include firms that can deliver groceries to customer’s homes thus eliminating the need for them to ever come to the grocery store in the first place.

What All Of This Means For You

You would think that being a product manager for a grocery store would be a good job to have. I mean, your product manager job description says that everyone needs the product that your store sells so you should have no lack of customers. However, what these product managers are starting to discover is that their millennial customers are going to the grocery store less often.

The reasons for the changes in shopping behavior are many. One of the most important ones is because the recent economic crisis has put a dent on the amount of money that millennials have to spend and so they go to the store less and end up spending less. Additionally, since millennials are putting off getting married and having children they have less need for what a grocery store sells. Millennials also have a host of alternative locations where they can drop in and buy the food that they need instead of going to a traditional grocery store. Product managers are reacting to this change in purchasing behavior by starting to create mobile apps that allow customers to place their orders for food online. They are starting to carry new lines of products that millennials can’t get anywhere else and they are now offering delivery service so that customers don’t even have to come to the grocery store any more.

The product managers at McDonald’s have a problem on their hands. A recent study revealed that among younger burger eaters, the millennials, only one in five has ever eaten a Big Mac burger. For a 61 year-old burger chain, this does not bode well for the future. McDonald’s product managers need to take a look at their product manager job description and realize that they have a new job on their hands: they need to figure out how they’re going to go about capturing younger customers.

By now we all know Amazon as the gigantic online store that sells just about everything. However, what a lot of us may not realize is that, depending on where you live, Amazon has expanded their product development definition to sell food. Lots of food. The product managers over at Amazon are under pressure to make more money all the time and it turns out that selling food does not leave a lot of room for finding ways to make more money – milk costs what milk costs. However, they think that they may have found a way to be even more successful: private label brands.

What Are Private Label Brands?

Private label brands, or house brands as they are sometimes known, are products that the seller of the groceries creates. The advantage of these brands is that the seller controls all aspects of the brand and doesn’t have to pay another firm that owns the brand and supplies the product. Private label brands are generally not advertised – they just show up in the store. This keeps the cost of offering the brands low. This is the kind of thing that we’d all like to add to our product manager resume.

Private label brands are often popular among customers assuming that their level of quality is comparable to the advertised national brands. Since the middle man has been cut out of the process, the grocer is generally able to offer private label brands for a lower cost than the national brands. In the U.S. last year, private label brands rung up US$118.4B in sales. This was up $2.2B from the year before.

Private label brands turn out to be good business for both the manufactures and their marketers. These brands require little or no marketing or brand development. The Amazon product managers realize that in the case of Amazon, creating their own private label brands may hold even more benefits. Since Amazon ships so many of their goods to their customers, if they control all aspects of their own private label brands then they may be able to design packaging that reduces their shipping costs and thus provides them with better control over their profit margins.

Amazon’s Private Label Brand Strategy

Amazon has started to offer whole bean and ground coffee under its Happy Belly private label brand. At the same time they have rolled out bottled Mama Bear baby food in two different flavors. Over the past year, Amazon has also introduced two lines of private label brand clothing. It has been reported that Amazon plans on offering four different private label brands including foods, diapers, clothes, and cleaning supplies. The brands will be sold exclusively to members of Amazon’s Prime service.

The Amazon product managers are in the process of developing their private label brand strategy. It appears as though they want them to be more than just discount alternatives to national brands. They have priced their coffee product in between two competing coffee products from Starbucks. At the same time the coffee has been priced to be cheaper than some small batch coffees.

At this point in time the Amazon product managers are downplaying their private label brands. They have made sure that that none of the product description pages for their private label products identifies Amazon. The customer service phone number is for a firm called AFS Brands Inc. Clearly Amazon is trying to avoid causing a big splash in the market as they introduce their new private label brands perhaps in order to win market share before doing any sort of major marketing push.

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers, one of the things that is on our product manager job description is that we have to find ways to make our product be more profitable. Over at Amazon, they have started selling groceries. The Amazon product managers would like to make their grocery offerings be more profitable. In order to make this happen, they are going to have to introduce some private label brands.

Private label brands allow Amazon to control all aspects of a product and they don’t have to pay another firm for all of the marketing and promotion that they have done. This keeps costs low. Private label brands are good business with higher profit margins. Amazon is planning on offering four different private label brands in different areas. Their pricing appears to be targeted at being in the middle of other brands. They are not publicizing their private label brand offerings at this point in time.

The Amazon product managers have a real challenge on their hands: grocery items are very difficult to make money on. The Amazon product managers have decided to introduce private label brands in order to allow them to control their product’s price and packaging. We’ll have to see how these house brands stack up to the competition over time!

If you were the product manager for a grocery store, you wouldn’t think that you’d have to worry about getting young people to come into your store and buy things, would you? I mean, we all need the food products that grocery stores sell. Traditionally people have always shopped for food the same way: they made up a list, they came to the store, and they bought everything that was on their list. However, it turns out that with the millennialsthings are a bit different…

The product managers over at McDonalds have a problem on their hands. Yes, they work for one of the most successful companies in the world. For over 60 years McDonalds has been synonymous with fast food. However, the world is changing and McDonalds is not changing with it. A recent study showed that only one in five millennials, a core market for McDonald’s, had ever tried a Big Mac burger. What’s happening is the company’s flagship product is no longer relevant. What’s a product manager to do?

The Problem With McDonald’s Burgers

So what went wrong with the McDonalds burger strategy and product development definition that had worked so well for so long? The first thing that happened was that sales stopped growing. Just a few years ago, the growth rate was an anemic 1% – 2% annually. Since then it’s slowed to nothing – the past few years have been flat. At the same time a new competitor has shown up: the so-called “better burger” chains. These restaurants offer their customers gourmet burgers that are made ready-to-order. The burgers are offered in a quick, casual service environment. All of this goes against McDonald’s core philosophy of providing standardized food as quickly as possible.

One of the problems that the McDonalds product managers are facing is that what they’ve been doing has worked in the past. At McDonald’s right now, the company gets 70% of its revenue from its drive through operations. The way that the company is able to serve so many people so quickly is because their burgers are made in advance, held in warming cabinets, and then they are ready when customers order them. The company’s goal is to be able to deliver a burger to a customer a mere 90 seconds after they have ordered it. This has served McDonalds well for a long time, but now it seems to be holding the company back.

The McDonald’s product managers have tried to keep up with the times. They have added more items to the menu. However, burgers still account for roughly 20% of the chains total sales. They have tried on a number of different occasions to introduce new burgers that were made with higher quality ingredients and which sold for a higher price. However, in each case, their customers have soundly rejected the new products. That’s not going to look good on anyone’s product manager resume.

What The McDonalds Product Managers Can Do

One of the big problems that the McDonald’s product managers are currently dealing with is that there is an overall feeling that the quality of the current burgers has slipped. Consumer Reports did a ranking of 21 different hamburger chains in 2016 and McDonald’s came in dead last. The reason for this is that the company has been making a number of changes to how they prepare their burgers in order to speed up the process. The result has been a lower quality product. What the McDonald’s product managers are now realizing is that the world is not waiting for another burger from McDonald’s, rather they are waiting for a better burger from McDonald’s.

What the McDonald’s product managers need are new ideas to attract more customers. They are using a panel to help the company refocus its efforts on the taste of its products. The company is investigating using a customized ordering system that allows customers to create a custom burger. The company is also investigating different cooking techniques. These include switching from the Teflon sheets that are used now and which are easy to clean up to using an iron grill that would produce a hotter burger. Combining this with buns that are being toasted for an additional 5 seconds results in a burger that is 15 degrees warmer when served to customers.

One big new idea that the product managers are currently considering is changing the beef that is used in the McDonald’s burgers. Currently the company and its processes are set up to use frozen beef. The product managers are considering switching to using fresh beef – this could improve the taste of the burgers. However, this kind of change has a lot of ramifications that come with it. Delivery, storage, and how to keep the meat so that it’s safe to use are key issues that would have to be solved by the product management team.

What All Of This Means For You

You would think that being a product manager at McDonald’s would be a great job. The company is very well known, it has been in business for over 60 years, and we’ve all eaten there before. However, times are changing and McDonald’s is being left behind. Their product managers need to use their product manager job description to discover what is going on and then they need to take action to reverse this trend.

Growth at McDonald’s over the past few years has been slow to non-existent. At the same time, a new class of competition in the form of “better burger” chains has shown up and has stolen McDonald’s core market of millennial customers. What McDonald’s is doing today is what has worked for them in the past. They have tried to change with the times by expanding their menu and adding higher quality burgers for a higher price. However, every time they’ve done this, it has been a failure. One of the reason that people are not selecting McDonald’s burgers is because the quality has fallen over the past few years. The company is trying to be innovative with new ordering systems and cooking techniques. Additionally, they are considering switching from using frozen beef to using fresh beef.

The good news for McDonald’s product managers is that the company is still successful. The bad news is that the company is not as successful as management wants it to be and the completion is even more successful than they are. The McDonald’s product managers are on the right track – it’s all about the taste. Now they just need to find a way to make their burgers taste better and still be able to deliver them fast and hot!

By now we all know Amazon as the gigantic online store that sells just about everything. However, what a lot of us may not realize is that, depending on where you live, Amazon has expanded their product development definition to sell food. Lots of food. The product managers over at Amazon are under pressure to make more money all the time and it turns out that selling food does not leave a lot of room for finding ways to make more money – milk costs what milk costs. However, they think that they may have found a way to be even more successful: private label brands.

The majority of consumers identify themselves as being meat lovers. What this means is that they like their burgers to be made with a nice juicy piece of meat. For a variety of reasons, this has created a challenge that a number of different product managers are trying to solve. Can they change the burger product development definition and create a burger that looks and tastes like the real thing with one important exception: it does not contain any meat?

The Meatless Burger

All of this discussion about a so-called meatless burger raises an immediate question: if there is no meat in these burgers, then just exactly what is in there? In one case its pea, soybean and beet molecules. In a different approach, bioengineers are growing muscle tissue from animal cells in steel containers. All of this is great news, but the product managers who are in charge of both approaches still have a fundamental question that they are going to need to be able to answer. The question is if they are going to be able to attract customers beyond the vegetarians and animal-rights activists. If they can, then they’ll have something to add to their product manager resume.

The product managers realize that in order to be successful, they are going to have to look beyond the people who have already chosen to eat plant based foods. Instead, they are going to have to see if they can win over the carnivores who really enjoy eating a very good burger.

The reason that the meatless burger product managers think that they have a chance in this market is because of what the surveys are telling them. First off, it turns out that consumer have a desire to purchase and consume products that can be shown to be easier on the environment to produce. Additionally, when surveyed 2/3 of consumers said that they would be willing to pay more for so-called “sustainable brands”. This has been borne out by the fact that sales of goods that advertise environmental benefits grew by more than 4% last year while growth was less than 1% for those that did not have such benefits.

How Product Manager Are Going To Make Meatless Burgers A Success

The challenge when you are the product manager for a meatless burger is to get people to start to try your product. A meatless burger startup has gotten two high-end restaurants to start to serve their product. The restaurants are charging between US$12 – $19 for burgers of varying sizes. The product managers say that they believe that their product will be able to compete with conventional beef once their production ramps up. Right now it costs $20 to create one patty while ground beef sells for $1.62 / pound.

One of the biggest challenges meatless burger product managers have is with the branding of their products. One meatless burger company has been able to reach an agreement to have their product sold by Whole Foods Market. Where to place the product has been a big issue. It was initially placed in the freezer. However, when the product was moved to the meat section the company saw its sales rise sharply.

Not only do meatless burger product managers have to create a product that tastes like the real thing, but t also has to behave like beef does. What this means is that their meatless burgers have to approximate the sizzle and the char of a real burger. Once you get this taken care of you need to be able to emulate the burger’s varied texture and its tangy flavor.

What All Of This Means For You

You would think that something like a burger would be safe from any sort of innovation, right? Well, you’d be wrong. It turns out that it’s quite expensive to support the animals and the infrastructure that is required to create that burger and so based on their product manager job description, product managers believe that there might be an opportunity for some form of a meatless burger to be successful.

Meatless burgers are made in one of two different ways. The first way uses plants such as peas and beets to create a simulation of a real burger. The other uses meat that is grown in the laboratory to create the burger. The key to success in this market will be to create a product that appeals to meat eaters. Surveys of customers reveal that they would be willing to pay more for products that don’t harm the environment. In order to get people to start trying meatless burgers, the product managers have gotten them to be served at high-end restaurants and sold at Whole Foods Market. Now all the product managers have to do is to make sure that their meatless burgers not only taste like real burgers but also act like real burgers do.

The time has arrived for meatless burgers. The cost and unsustainability of how we create our burgers today means that the opportunity for a different product is there. The meatless burger product managers just need to find out how to get all of us to give their new product a try!

The product managers over at McDonalds have a problem on their hands. Yes, they work for one of the most successful companies in the world. For over 60 years McDonalds has been synonymous with fast food. However, the world is changing and McDonalds is not changing with it. A recent study showed that only one in five millennials, a core market for McDonald’s, had ever tried a Big Mac burger. What’s happening is the company’s flagship product is no longer relevant. What’s a product manager to do?

Let’s face it, Amazon is a very big company that has done a lot of things correctly. We all know that we can visit their web site, pick out something that we want and almost magically it’s going to show up at our door in just a few days. All of this success has put some pressure on the Amazon product managers. They need to keep finding ways to allow the company to keep growing. As product managers we all know what this means – new products. Recently the Amazon product managers decided to expand their product development definition and introduced a new product that was yanked off the market after only a couple of days. What went wrong?

Paying For School

In the world that we live in, going to college is an expensive undertaking. Paying for four years (at least) of schooling, books, lab materials, housing, etc. can all add up. Most students who are just starting out on this journey don’t have enough savings to see them though the entire journey. What this means is that they are going to need to take some loans out now that they’ll hopefully be able to pay back after they get their degree and then go out and get a job.

Students who are looking to find a way to finance their college education generally have two options: federal loans (from the government) and private loans (from a bank). These two types of loans are very different from each other. Federal loans are currently being offered at a historically low interest rate of 3.76% fixed (which means that the interest rate won’t change). However, private loans are generally offered at much higher rates which currently could be as high as 13.74%.

The issue of just exactly how much debt a student is going to emerge from college with is a very important question. Generally speaking, student loans don’t have to be paid back while the student is in school. However, once they leave school (hopefully by graduating) the payments start. Currently students owe US$1.3 trillion (yes, that’s right – trillion) in student loans. More than 90% of that money is in the form of Federal loans. However, that also means that 10% of that very large number is owed to banks.

What Was Wrong With This Product

The issue of crushing students with loans that they will never be able to repay is currently in the news. Into this charged environment the Amazon product managers decided to step. Amazon teamed up with the bank Wells Fargo (you remember, the bank that just got in trouble for signing people up for products that they didn’t want) and planned on offering interest rate discounts on private student loans to qualified members of Amazon’s new “Prime Student” service. Sure sounds like something that could be added to a product manager resume.

Almost as soon as it was announced, this new product offering came under heavy fire. The Institute for College Access & Success (Ticas) is a nonprofit organization that focuses on higher-education as well as student-loan issues. Ticas said that the new Amazon product was an attempt to dupe students who are eligible for federal loans into taking out more costly private loans.

Ticas did more than just voice its objections to the Amazon / Wells Fargo partnership. They took their concerns to Capitol Hill in Washington. There they met with influential senators who are involved in the federal student loan program. These senators then met privately with Amazon and expressed their concern with Amazon using their brand to sell private student loans and that the discount that they were offering could be cancelled or changed at any time. The Amazon product managers got the message and Amazon and Wells Fargo ended up scrapping the product that had taken over a year to create.

What All Of This Means For You

Sometimes even the best sounding product can turn out to be a dud. In the U.S., when a student wants to go to college, it’s going to cost a lot of money. The product managers at Amazon saw an opportunity to create a product that would connect college bound students who use the Amazon service with discounted private college loans. It turns out that despite what they thought their product manager job description said, this was not a good idea.

Almost immediately after Amazon launched their new student loan matching service it started to get negative reviews. It turns out that in the U.S. students can get federal student loans with a very low interest rate. Private student loans are offered by banks and come with a much higher interest rate. Student advocacy groups were concerned that the Amazon brand would be used to steer students into higher priced private loans if they were not aware of the availability of federal student loans. Additionally, the Amazon deal was not all that great because the offered discounts could go away or be changed at any time.

This sure looks like a case where the Amazon product managers had their hearts in the right place, but they didn’t think the product offering through all the way. It turns out that only about 10% of all student loans are private loans and the people who offer these loans are not seen as being nice people. This is clearly one product offering that Amazon should never agreed to deliver!

The majority of consumers identify themselves as being meat lovers. What this means is that they like their burgers to be made with a nice juicy piece of meat. For a variety of reasons, this has created a challenge that a number of different product managers are trying to solve. Can they change the burger product development definition and create a burger that looks and tastes like the real thing with one important exception: it does not contain any meat?